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Nixon tapes reveal private talk with Soviet leader

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoAP file photoIn 1974, President Richard M. Nixon points to the transcripts of the White House tapes after he announced during a nationally-televised speech that he would turn over the transcripts to House impeachment investigators.

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YORBA LINDA, Calif. -- The final installment of secret recordings from President Richard Nixon's
White House reveals the president chatting warmly with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in the run-up
to a major summit.

The Oval Office conversation from June 18, 1973, was released today along with 340 hours of
tape and more than 140,000 pages of documents.

Nixon and Brezhnev met one-on-one with only an interpreter present for an hour and chatted
about personal topics, including their families.

The conversation happened before the start of a historic seven-day summit.

The tapes also include Nixon speaking with Ronald Reagan after delivering a public address on
Watergate.

Nixon made 3,700 hours of tape between February 1971 and July 1973 using a covert recording
system.

"This is a really big release in volume and importance, because of the time period it covers,"
said Luke Nichter of Texas A&M University-Central Texas in Killeen, who runs a website
cataloging Nixon's secret recordings. "This is the end of taping and this is Watergate really
beginning."

The recordings released today from the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda,
Calif., cover April 9, 1973, to July 12, 1973, the day before the existence of the covert recording
system was revealed to a Senate committee probing Watergate.

Also unveiled will be 140,000 pages of documents, including more than 30,000 recently
declassified items such as an intelligence analysis of Vietnam. Another 700 hours of Nixon tapes
remain classified or restricted and haven't been released because of national security and privacy
concerns.

Nixon's second term was quickly overrun by the Watergate scandal, which began in 1972 when
burglars tied to his re-election committee broke into the Democratic headquarters to get dirt on
his political adversaries.

Previous tape releases show the president as a paranoid man who was not afraid to use
bare-knuckle tactics to crush the enemies he saw all around him.

Tapes released in 2009 show, in particular, Nixon's obsession with the Kennedy family. He
considered Ted Kennedy such a political threat, for example, that he ordered surveillance in hopes
of catching him in an affair.

Today's release of 340 hours of audio promises is equally revealing, with material on
Watergate and conversations between Nixon and Henry Kissinger, three future presidents, and
celebrities Billy Graham and soccer superstar Pele.

The recordings cover a period that includes the resignation of two top White House staffers
and the attorney general in one day, the appointment of a special Watergate prosecutor, and the
formation of a the Senate committee that would elicit damning testimony precipitating Nixon's
political demise.

Nixon nonetheless kept busy with diplomacy that yielded important peace talks with the
Soviets and a thawing relationship with China - events also reflected on the tapes.

He met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in June 1973 for the only summit ever recorded on
an American presidential taping system. The meeting was a follow-up to Nixon's visit to the Kremlin
the year before and was the first attempt at U.S-hosted peace talks with the Soviets in six years.

The tapes also include material on the Vietnam peace settlement and the return of hundreds of
POWs to U.S. soil.

Faced with impeachment and a possible criminal indictment, Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974 - a
little more than a year after the tapes end - and retreated to his native California, where he was
pardoned a month later by Ford.